Sunday, May 22, 2011

Sitting at the Corner Brewery

It was already warm when I work up this morning, and although waking up at 10 am is, in some quarters, considered "late", I did just have a work day at the forest, and (although not sweating-bullets hard work) it was warm and humid enough to be exhausting, and so (coupled with the lack of good sleep leading up to last night), I was able to tuck into 11 hours of sleep with no problem.

What to do, what to do, what to do? Ran through my mind.

There was the outside possibility that a community member who helped out at yesterday's clean-up would come by to help use the two-man cross-cut saw to chop out the large Scots Pine that had been downed on the other side of the lake for a few weeks' time now.... However, I did also need to seriously knuckle down on writing a paper for an upcoming conference... and -- come to think of it -- I needed to seriously get cracking on figuring out what sorts of questions to be asking people in my interviews for this summer... and I really wanted to get out of the forest, out of Ann Arbor, and (in some way) out of my skin.

Well, Ypsilanti was a good solution to most of the problems. Well... at least the physical, positional problems. So, I packed up my bike and headed out of the already bird-calling, insect chir-chir-chirrr-ing forest and onto the (somewhat) open road toward the border-to-border trail that basically follows the Huron River as it flows in from Livingston County to the north and out to Wayne County to the east. The 10-mile (ish) section between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti is one that is well-traveled (possibly the most traversed part of the whole thing).

This time, to change things up a little bit, I decided to stay on Dixboro Road instead of following the BtoB along behind St. Joe's Hospital, and soon I found myself approaching Washtenaw Ave (a bane of cycling and walking, having been expanded with the sole purpose of pushing cars down an ever-widening (now six-lane beast) of a roadway, and damn the people who don't want to drive).

Wooops! Gotta turn around now.... Hrm.... Clark Road? It seems to ring a bell. I'll take that one.... Oh, yeah... the EMU stadium. That looks familiar. And the BtoB is really tempting now that there's a bastard of a Ford Focus riding my tail as if I didn't have a right to the roadway. Read the law, you bastard!

Eventually, I made it to the Corner Brewery, at which I was hoping for a little bit of quiet repast in addition to my mug of locally brewed magic. However, the latter was not to be: there was a pub crawl in session. Oh well, at least I've got Ypsilanti Wireless and a fresh 1/2 liter of Mackinac Fudge Stout to help me through before I go out and try to find a coffee shop with WiFi and a plug-in. I'm thinking Bombadill's on Michigan Ave.